The concept of time is one of many themes in the Doctrine and Covenants—and all of scripture. A new book from the Maxwell Institute calls it the “0th principle” of the gospel, a foundational value underlying every other principle we live by. Seeing time in this way can change how we worship, how we remember the past, and how we act in the present. In this interview, scholar Philip Barlow discusses Time: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants, exploring how becoming “time literate” can transform relationships, expand agency, and deepen joy.
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Introduction to Time: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants
How does your study of time in Latter-day Saint theology compare to broader philosophical perspectives?
There is a genre of popular and business-oriented books and courses—and some religious ones too—that promotes efficiency, organization and diligence, or slow down themes in relation to time (think “Franklin Planners.”) My book is unlike these. At the opposite pole, dense works on “time” have been crafted by philosophers, theologians, and physicists. Such literature can be important for people serious about grappling with the mysteries and metaphysics of time.
I try to be informed by such work, but my slender volume has a different intent. It is a work about discipleship, approached through the lens of “time.”
It asserts that the gospel is suffused with time concerns, without our having much noticed. Or that when we do notice, we sometimes do so with problematic thinking (such as with the Second Coming, which undermines faith because it’s always coming but never comes, or can foster attitudes of chronic urgency and attendant anxiety, or images of a vengeful God, or irresponsibility toward our environment).
Probing time as a gospel topic will sound odd at first hearing––we don’t have Sunday School lessons or sacrament talks on “time”––but it seems odd only because time is a dimension so diffuse in the scriptures and in our daily lives that we scarcely recognize it as a particular category. We haven’t developed a vocabulary to notice and explore it theologically.
It seems either something to take for granted or, to the contrary, something too elusive and daunting to fuss with in other than routine ways (like addressing deadlines or growing wistful about growing old).
In contrast to both of these perspectives, I’m trying to point out that becoming “time literate” can enrich our lives in the gospel and elevate our happiness quotient. If our relation to time is skewed or trivial, this will affect our relationship with God, with others, and with our oft-fractured selves.
What scholars or sources outside of the Latter-day Saint tradition influenced your thinking on time?
The literature on this subject is vast. I’ll share ten book-length works that have influenced my thinking. The first five are especially dear to me, or serve as accessible introductions for readers outside the Latter-day Saint tradition.
Especially Dear or Highly Recommended
- Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey through the Hours of the Day — David Steindl-Rast: My favorite brief devotional meditation on time (and silence), written simply and beautifully “to the monk in all of us.”
- Leisure: The Basis of Culture — Josef Pieper: A secular, equally illuminating, and equally slender companion volume to Steindl-Rast’s work.
- A Very Brief History of Eternity — Carlos Eire: Considers the rise and fall of five different notions of eternity and their influence on our individual and collective self-understanding.
- The Gifts of the Jews — Thomas Cahill: A user-friendly way to grasp the Hebrew Bible’s enduring influence on Western concepts of time.
- The Sabbath — Abraham Joshua Heschel: First provoked me to think of the Sabbath as a “temple in time.” The book’s final line—“Eternity utters a day”—remains unforgettable.
Other Significant Influences
- A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking: Widely known, but worth mentioning for its impact.
- Einstein’s Dreams — Alan Lightman: A playful and readable novel imagining worlds where time works differently.
- The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli: An accessible, scientifically informed look at questions such as: Why do we remember the past but not the future? Does time really “flow”? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?
- Confessions (Book XI: O Lord, What Is Time?) — Augustine: Contains his famous meditation on the nature of time, born of an existential “time crisis.”
- The Encyclopedia of Time — Samuel Macey, ed.: A sweeping reference work covering time in science, philosophy, history, art, and more—perfect for getting blissfully lost.
???? Books Mentioned (Amazon Links)
A Brief History of Time · Einstein’s Dreams · The Order of Time · Confessions · The Encyclopedia of Time
Insights from Studying Time in Scripture and Theology
Were there any surprising discoveries in your research that challenged your previous understanding of time in scripture?
I have long recognized that time suffuses certain gospel principles, such as the Sabbath, “the millennium,” and the pre-existence and afterlife. One profound surprise that emerged as I wrote the book, however, is that I came to see that time is bound up in every gospel principle, either by shaping the principles or by being essential to how we call them into reality and life.
We are asked to have faith in events that occurred long before our birth and far into the future. Repentance is a profound reconciliation of the past with the present. Baptism signifies a death and a rebirth, which are “time” things.
As anyone who attends to a loved one with dementia might come to discern, agency is largely a mirage apart from mastery of a certain kind of time and memory. Aspects of time pervade all gospel precepts.
The Sabbath as Sacred Time in Latter-day Saint and Jewish Thought
How have Jews viewed the Sabbath as a temple in time?
Centuries before Israel had a temple, it had the Sabbath. The Sabbath was holiness in the guise of time, as the temple would later become holiness in the form of space. We Latter-day Saints are fortunate to carry a well-developed sense of sacred space, centered especially in the temple, but also in the concept of Zion.
Rabbinic thinkers over the ages developed a parallel sense of sacred time. In the twentieth century, Rabbi Abraham Heschel (mentioned above) wrote eloquently of the Sabbath as a “palace in time.” To help us see his point, I thought it helpful to replace “palace” with “temple.”
As with a temple in space, a temple in time requires care: in its architectural conception, its individual components, and its protection and maintenance.
Like a temple in space, a temple in time matters for more than its surface utility. It must also be a work of art, Heschel says, because this sort of beauty is not mere decoration. It is a reflection of the divine. While thoughtful labor can be a craft, the perfect rest of the Sabbath is an art. It derives from a harmony of body, mind, and imagination. With proper discipline, we build this temple with soul, joy, and reticence.
In the atmosphere of this protected temple, we can discover that we are adjacent to eternity. The kind of sabbath I describe in the book (radical but not extreme) can itself become an expression of eternity.
Why do Latter-day Saints sometimes feel imprisoned by the Sabbath?
Some disciples may feel imprisoned by the Sabbath, as I did when I was young, because we learned of the day through a series of “thou shalt nots” (no shopping, no working, no playing, no fun) or “thou shalts” (go to lots of meetings, perform your ministering, read scriptures, be pious).
D&C 59 can seem confining. It says that we are to “do none other thing” on this holy day other than to rest from our labors; to go to the house of prayer to offer up sacraments, oblations, and vows; to confess our sins; and to prepare our food with singleness of heart. With hyperbolic humor, Brigham Young declared us all to be Sabbath breakers: “The fact is,” said he, “to keep the Sabbath we must lie in bed all day and scarcely breathe.”
It was my portal to a new kind of freedom.
In chapter one of Time: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants, I describe the results of an experiment I conducted in keeping a radical (meaning “root,” as in a radish) Sabbath, but not a fanatical (“doubling our speed when we’ve lost our way”) one. I call the chapter “Radical Sabbath Accoustics” because I learned I could better hear the voice of God not through long lists of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots,” but by thoroughly letting go of the ordinary world, with its striving to accomplish, its anxieties, and its distractions.
After some practice, I awakened to the realization that, without my experimental Sabbath (and some additional mini-Sabbaths during weekdays), I was embezzling my own life. I was more busy but less alive and less joyful. It took some practice, but in time I found a radical “keeping” (i.e., protecting, honoring) of the Sabbath to be the opposite of imprisonment. It was my portal to a new kind of freedom.
Does the opposite problem exist?
The Sabbath may not constrict us because it isn’t taken too seriously. That is partly because we lack an understanding of what the day can be—what it can do for our consciousness, our measure of joy. This lack of seriousness comes mostly from two contrasting influences.
From within the church, we may misunderstand Jesus’s proclamation (that the Sabbath was made for “man” and not the other way around) to mean the day is somewhat dispensable. We mistakenly take Jesus’s rebuke of legalistic and judgmental Pharisees to mean the Sabbath is a casual affair.
The second influence comes from outside the church: the everyday secular world. We experience the day with nonchalance because we like our freedom, because we like not to be too different from our neighbors, and because keeping a real Sabbath seems too churchy and un-fun. Our reaction may be to make the Sabbath a duplicate or diluted Saturday, except perhaps for our two-hour church attendance in Sunday attire.
Obedience, Urgency, and the Gospel’s Relationship with Time
How do you define “obedience” in a higher and holier way? Does that definition align with how the word is used in scripture?
We commonly take obedience to suggest submission to some authority or edict, often in the form of prohibitions: Thou shalt not…. The word “obey,” however, traces its origins not to the secondary idea of compliance to rules, but to attention, to hearing (out of which respect for wise and purposeful rules may become natural).
The deepest spiritual call of obedience is not capitulation to some real or semi-coercive authority, but is a yearning awakened by the quality and virtue of the call, to its truth and beauty, as when we respond to Beethoven’s 9th symphony or Milton’s word-painting of the devotion between Adam and Eve before the fall. In its original meanings, the opposite of “obedience” is absurdity: The Latin “ab” intensifies “surdus,” which signifies dull, deaf, or mute.
The origins of “obedience” = attention.
Something of this original sense of obedience comes through in scripture when we encounter the antique term “hearken,” which has “to hear” built into it: to hear, to attend to, but also to respond.
Church President Russell Nelson has spoken thoughtfully of these latter terms and their import.
The relevance of all this to “time” is explored from the first chapter of the book, a meditation urging a reconceiving of one’s Sabbath. The origins of “obedience, ” again, go back to attention (whose importance is made clearer when we recognize attention as the most common and important expression of love, according to some psychiatrists).
And real attention requires time and even a reconsideration of time. The Sabbath can be a mode of hearing God distinctively. And when we obey (hear, hearken), we grow in clarity, purpose, fulfillment, and joy.
What is religiously mandated haste, and why does it thrive among Latter-day Saints?
We Latter-day Saints tend to be diligent. This is lovely when applied to lovely causes with generosity and service: We “put our shoulders to the wheel” and “push along”; we “lengthen our stride”; the industrious honeybee (“deseret”) is a ubiquitous symbol in Zion, which will not be built by sloth.
However, diligence can assume less healthy forms, inside and outside of the church. Ask students at a rigorous college what is the first word they think of when you say “time,” and they are apt to express some form of “stress.”
In economically and technologically advanced societies such as the United States, diligence attaches easily to deadlines, creating cultures of perpetual hurry, bringing anxiety. Coupled with our religion, which aspires to noble “progress” and sacrifice, unrelenting diligence can incubate perfectionism.
Gospel principles viewed through warped lenses yield warped results.
When diligence couples with capitalism and endless consumer-driven hustle, we can be caught in states of chronic urgency. Commercial deadlines can be accentuated by misunderstandings about the Second Coming of the Lord–the ultimate deadline.
Laziness, dullness, distraction, and lack of purpose are not spiritually healthy states. But neither are exhaustion, depression, anxiety, and perfectionistic despair. Gospel principles viewed through warped lenses yield warped results. A thoughtful consideration of time as a gospel principle can help.
The fruits of such consideration include enhanced clarity, light, joy, purpose, and peace.
Eternity, the Present Moment, and Latter-day Saint Views on Agency
What is the role of “now” in eternity?
Mystery of Time
Eternity is a great mystery, of course. But, then, so is its step-child, “time.” Folks tend to think of eternity as a very, very long time—without end. Other understandings hold that “time” is ultimately unreal; it is merely our word for “movement” (Aristotle) or “change” (Einstein). Some believe that God is outside of time and sees it as a panorama, all at once, as we view a mural.
Like reason and science, scripture does not dissolve such mysteries. One passage declares that God does not measure time, which is a human affair. But another suggests a thousand years is as one day to God, and time on Kolob is portrayed as measured rather clearly. In yet another passage, “Eternal” is a name for God rather than a strand of time without end.
Scriptural references to time and eternity are often marshalled with striking imagery to incite our humility or sense of urgency rather than for scientific precision.
So we must respect the mystery of time and eternity, and yet we can also engage them in fruitful ways that can elevate joy on earth and bring us closer to Divinity.
The Present Is “Now”
Amidst all this, some religious traditions have developed insight about the importance of “now.” In Christianity this traces back especially to Augustine around the year 400 C.E. Augustine experienced a “time crisis.” He reasoned that the past does not exist, except in our minds as memory.
Similarly, he surmised that the future does not exist except by our anticipation. The present is the only time that is real, where we really live. And the present is infinitely brief; it is “now.” We might call it a “fleeting moment,” but instead that fleeting moment is always with us, like the crest of a wave.
We move with it or in it (or it moves with or in us; or we don’t actually move, but “change” moves around us). Because the present instant is always with us, then, Augustine called it “the eternal now.” Because this perpetual now is the real and only time-place where we actually are, it behooves us to remain aware of this, to embrace it.
Informed by the past and by our anticipations and goals for the future, we live and act now, always. That is where our agency lies.
Being fully aware that our real existence is in the “now,” some suggest, is the taste of eternity. This can have implications also for how we experience a radical Sabbath, divested of fret and striving and grudges and labor. In the Sabbath, “eternity utters a day.”
How can we pause time to increase agency? How does living reactively decrease agency even more than coercion?
Time can seem inexorable, as in Jacob’s lament near the end of his life:
The time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream.
Jacob 7:26
Yet time is also malleable, as when an improving quarterback notices that the game of football “is slowing down for me.”
That is, his increasing skills and confidence are allowing him not to panic amidst the commotion, as well as to see the field and his options more clearly and calmly and to respond accordingly. The degree of our agency is affected by our perception of time.
Agency is unreal if we imagine it as the freedom to do anything.
A related point is that agency is unreal if we imagine it as the freedom to do anything we wish. This sort of freedom can be inhibited or shaped by all manner of things: our age or gender; the “natural man” inclinations of our species; our imagination or education; even a strait-jacket.
Real agency is more focused and limited. It consists of our capacity to choose among live options amid specific circumstances. And these circumstances include the circumstance of being ourselves, with our complex genetic and social inheritances, which make the majority of our reactions to situations come by second nature.
We can see this clearly if we’ve ever been a companion to a person beset by dementia or a certain type of brain damage. Such a person’s short-term memory may be damaged, leaving him or her to act as they are programmed to act—with endless repetition.
Many philosophers and psychologists, to say nothing of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, have come to think that we are so programmed that human agency is largely a mirage. We perceive ourselves as free and are indeed free to some extent to do what we want, but where do those wants and inclinations come from? They come from deeply formed habits, family and general culture, and the DNA of our ancestors of which we are composed.
This insight can be taken too far. Agency is real, but it’s useful to keep three things in mind:
- Agency is more constrained than we are generally aware.
- It is crucial to distinguish between instinctive reaction and thoughtful response.
- It helps to see that what agency we possess is affected by our naïve or disciplined sense of time. Between any stimulus that comes to us and any behavior we enact following that stimulus, there is a space. It is a Time-space. It is also a mind- and a spirit-space.
“In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”[1]
Reaction may be transformed into response.
When, as often, we do not claim that space but simply react, our agency is minimal. In that case, our behavior is as predictable, to God or even to humans who know us intimately, as a series of dominoes standing in a queue, easily toppled with a flick of a finger, in a chain reaction.
When we do claim that space—when we pause to decide—then instinctive reaction may be transformed into intentional response. We know this intuitively, but often have not been taught how to make space in our moment-to-moment lives.
This language of “making” time-space rightly implies that our inner sense of time is malleable. We can learn to pause, to slow time, to expand it—and with it to enlarge our agency. We can practice such skills, we can cultivate a sense of openness and acceptance to what comes to us on any given day, and we can grow the discipline to live a life of response rather than reaction.
This is among the most important skills one can cultivate as a person and as a disciple. Being good, kind, and loving is essential, but not sufficient. We were sent to earth to pursue the divine nature, which is centered in love but also in capacity and wisdom and skill.
Time, Memory, and Personal Transformation in the Gospel
How can changing the way we think about the past affect our futures?
I once witnessed my two-year-old daughter descending from the top of the stairs with nothing on but her heavily-laden diaper. “Ah-oh, Lindsay,” I said, “it looks like we’d better change that thing.” I loosened the diaper and it fell to the ground with a soft thump. Lindsay looked up at me and explained: “Brett did it!”
Charmed by her response, I was twenty years later recounting the experience to Lindsay as one evening we relaxed in our living room. She was enjoying stories of her childhood, so I retrieved my computer to call up others. When I glanced at my notes of the story of the diaper and the stairs—the images so clearly etched in my mind—I was startled to learn that I had not been present at the event.
My notes informed me that my wife had told me of the episode when I came home from work that day long ago. Over time, I had unconsciously appropriated the story in the retelling (and re-membering) across the years, as though I had been an eye-witness.
Our memories are not only imperfect, selective, and malleable; they are partly fabricated. Our actual experiences may entwine with other bits we’ve heard, dreamt, feared, hoped, or assumed. Sometimes, indeed, what we take to be events in our past turn out to be interactions between our memories of what actually happened in addition to what we have taken to be the implications of such experiences. Jennifer publicly humiliated Jeremy in 8th grade; he feels vulnerable and doomed to humiliation into his 60s.
The relevance of these time- and memory-strands to the gospel and to the future is potentially large. It might reframe our understanding of repentance, for example. Or our sense of who we ourselves are, which dictates much of our present behavior and what we imagine to be possible in the future.
Our capacity to reimagine our past might also temper our faith-threatening anger about some event in church history and how we are to relate to the church in the present—or in the yet to come.
Key Takeaways from Philip Barlow’s Study of Time
If readers take away only one key insight from your book, what do you hope it will be?
It would be the idea that, unbeknownst to us, “time” brims with the gospel, which lends to time its meaning. And the gospel in turn brims with time—so much so that we might think of time as the 0th principle of the gospel, affecting all other principles that we ordinarily recognize.
If we paused to become “time literate” in relation to the gospel, it could change our sense of who we are, what we perceive as “real,” how we live, and our capacity for hearing God and for joy.
The backdrop to such large claims is that our “religion” (to bind together, as with a ligament) is ultimately about relationships. Atonement is a relationship word, as are family, love, vicarious, sealing, kindness, prayer, progress, and many others.
Five Primary Relations
I think five relationships are primary and if any one of these is askew, our relationship to the others will be marred as well:
- Our relation to God.
- Our relation to one another.
- Our relation to our oft-fractured selves.
- Our relation to the outside world we call “reality.”
- Our relation to time.
Every gospel principle presupposes time, but we need understanding, skill, and discipline (as well as grace) to live into our principles.
Did You Enjoy This?
About the Scholar
Philip L. Barlow is a leading voice on American religious history and Latter-day Saint theology. He earned his PhD in American Religious History and Culture from Harvard Divinity School and is Associate Director of the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU. Previously, he served as the first Leonard J. Arrington Professor of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. His work spans scripture, theology, and the Latter-day Saint experience, including Mormons and the Bible and the co-edited Oxford Handbook of Mormonism. A former president of the Mormon History Association, Barlow is known for combining scholarly rigor with faith-informed insight—especially when exploring “time” as a core gospel theme.
Further Reading
- Who Is Philip Barlow?
- Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants: A Maxwell Institute Book Series
- “Seeing” in the Doctrine and Covenants
- “Agency” in the Doctrine and Covenants
- Why Did Eerdmans Publish a Book on Latter-day Saint Theology?
Time in Latter-day Saint Theology
- Time: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants (Maxwell Institute)
- Prisoners of Time (Wayfare)
- Questing and Questioning (Sunstone)
- Time in Scripture and Science: A Conciliatory Key? (BYU Religious Studies Center)
- The Eternal in the Temporal (Y Religion)
Footnotes
- These words, unattributable so far as I can determine, though sometimes misattributed to Viktor Frankl, are nonetheless true. They are akin to the more complex formulation of existential psychologist Rollo May, who may be the approximate source: “Freedom is…not the opposite to determinism. Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, [not predetermined, but determined in a different sense: determined] to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.” “Freedom and Responsibility Re-Examined.” Behavioral Science and Guidance: Proposals and Perspectives. Esther Lloyd-Jones and Esther M. Westervelt, eds. (NY: Columbia University Teachers College, Bureau of Publications, 1963), p. 103.
